Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani
He is Shihāb al-Dīn Abu ’l-Faḍl Aḥmad ibn Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī. The word Ḥajar is the name of one of his grandfathers. His kunyā is Abu ’l-Faḍl and his laqab is Shihāb al-Dīn. al-ʿAsqalānī is a noun of ascription relating to Asqalān in Syria, where his great-grandparents lived. Birth, Family and Early Life Abu ’l-Faḍl Aḥmad ibn Ḥajar's family originated in the district of Qābis in Tunisia. Some members of his family had settled in Palestine, which they left when faced with the Crusader threat, but he himself was born in Egypt in 773 AH/1372 CE - the son of the Shāfiʿī scholar and poet Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī and the learned and aristocratic Tujjār. Both died in his infancy, and he was later to to praise his elder sister, Sitt al-Rakb, for acting as his 'second mother'. The two children became wards of the brother of their father's first wife, Zakī al-Din al-Kharrūbī, who entered the young Ibn Ḥajar into a Qur'ānic school (kuttāb) when he reached five years of age. Here he excelled, learning Surāh Maryam in a single day, and progressing to the memorisation of texts such as the Mukhtaṣar of Ibn al-Ḥājib on uṣūl. By the time he accompanied al-Kharrūbī to Makkah at the age of 12, he was competent enough to lead the Tarāwīḥ prayers in the Holy City, where he spent much time studying and recalling Allāh amid the pleasing simplicity of Kharrūbī's house, the Bayt al-ʿAynā, whose windows looked directly upon the Black Stone. Two years later his protector died, and his education was entrusted to the ḥadīth scholar Shams al-Dīn ibn al-Qaṭṭan, who entered him into courses given by the great Cairene scholars al-Bulqīnī (d. 806 AH) and Ibn al-Mulaqqin (d. 804 AH) in Shāfiʿī fiqh, and of Zayn al-Din al-Irāqī (d. 806 AH) in ḥadīth, after which he was able to travel to Damascus and Jerusalem, where he studied under Shams al-Din al-Qalqashandī (d. 809 AH), Badr al-Dīn al-Balisī (d. 803 AH) and Fāṭimah bint al-Manja al-Tanūkhiyya (d. 803 AH). After a further visit to Makkah and Madīnah, and to Yemen, he returned to Egypt. His Later Life When he reached 25, he married the brilliant and lively Ānās Khātūn, then 18 years of age. She was a ḥadīth expert in her own right, holding ijāzas from Zayn al-Din al-Irāqī, and she gave celebrated public lectures in the presence of her husband to crowds of ulema, among whom was Imām al-Sakhāwī. After the marriage, Ibn Ḥajar moved into her house where he lived until his death. So widely did her reputation for sanctity extend that during her fifteen years of widowhood, which she devoted to good works, she received a proposal from Imām ʿAlam al-Din al-Bulqīnī, who considered that a marriage to a woman of such charity and barakah would be a source of great pride. Once esconced in Egypt, Ibn Ḥajar taught in the Sūfi lodge (khāniqāh) of Baybars for some twenty years, and then in the ḥadīth school known as Dār al-Ḥadīth al-Kāmiliyya. During these years, he served on occasion as the Shāfiʿī chief qadi of Egypt. It was in Cairo that the Imām wrote some of the most thorough and beneficial books ever added to the library of Islāmic civilisation. Among these are al-Durar al-Kāmina, a commentary on Imām al-Nawawī's Forthy Ḥadīth, Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb, Fatḥ al-Bārī fī Sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, al-Iṣāba fi tamyiz al-Ṣaḥāba and Bulūgh al-Maram min adillat al-aḥkām. Fatḥ al-Bārī His magnum opus, Ibn Ḥajar's Fatḥ al-Bārī (lit. 'Victory of the Creator') is the most celebrated commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. He commenced the enormous task of assembling it in 817 AH, expending over 25 years of his life on its compilation. It began as a series of formal dictations to his ḥadīth students, after which he wrote it out in his own hand and circulated it section by section to his pupils, who would discuss it with him once a week. As it progressed and Ibn Ḥajar's fame grew, the Islāmic world took a close interest in the new work. In 833 AH, Tīmūr's son Shāhrūkh sent a letter to the Mamluk sultān al-Ashraf Barsbay requesting several gifts, including a copy of the Fatḥ, and Ibn Ḥajar was able to send him the first three volumes. In 839 AH, the request was repeated, and further volumes were sent, until, in the reign of al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq, the whole text was finished and a complete copy was dispatched. Similarly, the Moroccan sultān Abū Faris ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ḥafṣī requested a copy before its completion. When it was finished, in Rajab 842 AH, a great celebration was held in an open place near Cairo, in the presence of the ulema, judges and leading personages of Egypt. Ibn Ḥajar sat on a platform and read out the final pages of his work, and then poets recited eulogies and gold was distributed. It was, said one historian, 'the greatest celebration of the age in Egypt.' The work is appreciated by the ulema for the doctrinal soundness of the author, for its complete coverage of Bukhārī's material, its mastery of the relevant Arabic sciences, the wisdom it shows in drawing lessons (fawā'id) from the aḥadīth it expounds upon. The dicussions include detailed investigations of the precise linguistic and lexicological meaning of the Prophetic speech, studies of the isnād, debates of the circumstances surrounding the genesis of each ḥadīth (asbāb al-wurūd), and issues of abrogation by stronger or later aḥadīth or by Qur'ānic texts. His Death Ibn Ḥajar died in 852 AH. His funeral was attended by 'fifty thousand people', including the sultān and caliph; 'even the Christians grieved'. He was remembered as a gentle man, short, slender and white-bearded, a love of calligraphy and much inclined to charity; 'good to those who wronged him and forgiving to those he was able to punish.'